Monday November 29, 2004

Change Acceptance and PR

Browsing through blogs I came across a very interesting blog by Richard Edelman who is president of the Edelman Public Relations Firm. I never thought of change acceleration as Public Relations (PR) but reading Edelman's blog entry on Ethics in PR I realized that Change Acceleration work is in many ways just PR internal to a company. Of course I am talking about the kind of public relations that builds a market for a product and facilitates the conversation between a company and its markets.

In his essay Edelman says “ we should demand a seat at the decision making table and not simply accept the role of mouthpiece for legal counsel. We have a unique sense of the potential impact of a given action on multiple stakeholders, from Wall Street to employees and consumers. If we are limited to a classic, small box communications role, we are unable to fulfill our broader mandate of advice and counsel.”

The same is absolutely true for change acceleration. I've found that if someone in IT just wants us to do communications it really doesn't make sense for my change acceleration team to engage with them because we can't achieve the full potential of change acceleration. In contrast for the JDS change acceleration effort our learnings on issues like support needs, bugs, performance perceptions and the transition process helped improve the quality of our JDS Preview deployment. On projects where the developers really just want us to come in at the last minute and help write some emails it is really not worth our time.

I think there are other lessons to be learned about how to do change acceleration if I think about it as a form of public relations. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. (2004-11-29 15:25:24.0) Permalink